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It may surprise people to know that I am very often disappointed with the way things are, and supposedly how everything is meant to work. I very often look at the way society is and how it manipulates how we feel and what we can and cant do, and I cant help but feel disappointed. If you feel that something makes you feel like a million dollars, then why do you not do it more often? And if you look at our excuses…what are they? I’m busy with other things, i need to see other people, what will other people think if i did? And i often look at the bigger picture of, what did i do with my life if I reach my death bed and get to look back? well I spent all my energy on people that i hope one day will change and turn out they didn’t? or did i spend what time and energy I had on this earth with people who respect me, love me and want me to be the best version of me possible, through the good and bad.

you see, i think we spend our time searching for something in our life, without exploring what we have already more.All I know that I want to connect, i want to grow, I want to explore, and I want to share what I have with the people i respect and love, and I dont want to wait anymore.

After the 16th hour of games, I took the cucumber slices of my eyes and soathing creams of my face(even I find that image ridiculous, because I’m obviously kidding), and with how much I knew this fantastic day was over, I knew It was time to leave and go home. For those that have no clue what I am on about, I was part of yesterdays brilliant international tabletop day devised by my fellow geek’s at Geek and Sundry.the idea was to get everyone around the world to host an event, wherever they can and with whoever they can, and play board games all day, which is frigging awesome.So me and my new friends from Newcastle gamers decided to do just that, and we decided to do it for charity i.e all the money that’s raised from it is going to a local charity here in Newcastle England.

tabletop day on the service is such a simple idea, yet something like 3300 events in 50 countries participated in the simple act of playing board games with strangers, friends, family, all to embrace and enjoy the brilliant, coming together of people that gaming can create. It generally gives me hope that we can take the word geek and gaming, and mean it as abstractly as I do, that its about being interested, and appreciate the things that we love not to discriminate against for liking things, whether they are different or not. That’s why gaming is beautiful and this idea is so awesome, because it gets together people for all ages, with all different ideas or varying levels of relationships/friendships and gets to know someone more while playing something fun, engaging and enjoyable.

What other thing does that so effectively? how many times have you fought members of your family for the remote and lost? sitting painlessly through a show that you really didn’t want to watch? well, we played for 16 hours and not one time did someone request not to play something. The great thing is that even if your shit at something, which I am for most games, then you still have the advantage of talking and enjoying the company, in a sense the game doesn’t matter if the company is good. With gamers, the majority are interested, keen to try something new and you find that if you play something they want to play, they’ll play a game of yours. this is due to games being playable more so than ever right to the end, so you don’t feel alienated, and TV regardless of what people say, is practically becoming a solo activity, because there’s so much stuff to watch and its hard to find something for everyone. in games, so much choice, but you literally can’t play without cooperation and you still get the end result: bags of geeky fun stuff! which ironically is a name I used to dance under.

as I said earlier the great thing about games , and tabletop day was a great example of this, is that the time fame of games is so diverse that whatever your in the mood for you can play. like i brought food from home so while some peeps went out for food, we played zombie dice, in which the dice were literally trying to kill me! as you’ll see in the photo, the idea is to avoid the bullet symbols and i rolled 5! this is really hard to suck that bad, its really rare. as in if i poked myself in the eye, while wearing an eye patch on the other eye, or including not playing the game in the first place, i still could roll better than i did then! but as luck would have it, I won in the next turns! but its simple and can be a two player game, so while we were waiting there was still something to play that was great. for your hilarity I’d never won in 2 months since going to my club, but the strange thing about it is its a very short term effect in actually winning. the first feeling I have is ”That’s awesome can we play again’, or ‘lets play another game’. If you look at the first photo of this blog for example, that’s part of a game called war on terror, where you wear the evil hat if your evil, now i know i look like a dick (i do anyway and some think I’m evil anyway) but the thing is, it really didn’t matter. I wasn’t bullied for it, it was all in good spirit! And I hope that one of the things that tabletop does is that it brings people who are worried about being humiliated or picked on , that it really isn’t the case and that they try coming along like people did at the event. free hugs for everyone!

Its funny as i say that because it reminded me that ever since I’ve learnt to accept who I am and what I like, far less people attack me for being who I am. and the irony is, it was more when I wasn’t doing geeky things that people attacked me for liking the things I liked that I wasn’t letting myself like in the first place. in gaming circles 99% of the time your accepted instantly and you’ll find people in there you really like. and it really isn’t a competitive environment so the idea of losing is not anywhere near as humiliating as the douche bag lack of real spirited gamers that attack you online for being supposedly shit at something. This is why board games in particular are awesome, because its underpinnings are promoting cooperation between the players, whether your playing against each other, or not. That’s why in particular games like castle panic or pandemic, lord of the rings and other co-operative games are great for people who are unsure, because its all of you versus the board. of course you may get someone with more experience playing the game, but in general they are all for hearing what you think we should do, that’s why its a much more enjoyable experience! us gamers want you there!

That’s why I really like someone if they say, yeah ill play, ill play anything, rather than someone that goes ‘dude that doesn’t sound like something id like’. how the feck do you know? if you like games, then i generally would like you (i would like to hug you too for being awesome), because i do think your more likely to be open minded, imaginative, interested in the same things as me. or not interested in anything I like, and that’s the point, games gets us together to talk about and enjoy anything. look at a game we played on tabletop day like pandemic(photo picture on the right),your going to get beat by it, but we tried, and we nearly beat it on legendary! we were 2 steps away from curing all the disease. for those that don’t know the game you have to stop a world wide pandemic by working together to cure all 4 viruses that are affecting the world. if you play on legendary, you never win, but we had the cure, we only had one card in the deck that could kill us, and it came out! I really wanted to rage quit! but we spent most of the day bringing it up how awesome it was playing together, and I didn’t know the guys I was playing with but I liked playing the game with them. Isn’t that great? Peeps I didn’t know and we already have a story about us playing a game we lost at. that’s the point, whether you win or not, its fun, you laugh, you enjoy yourself. which is good cos i usually win fuck all 🙂

That’s why i love being a geek as well as a gamer, the openness to accept people and allow people to show how much they like things.I saw an article with Simon Pegg recently that said exactly the same thing about geeks. Being a geek is not only having an interested, a love, but it allows you to be that way for everything. Its such a better existance to love what you love because it makes you happy, because you’ll find that it makes other people around you more comfortable within themselves, which is exactly what being a geek as done for me. in a sense I’m not being anything, geek is not a group, its in many ways an ideology of just being interested about people, and not letting anyone who doesn’t, stop you from loving the things you do. I played 16 hours worth of games during the event, and all it felt like was getting to know people, and loving the hell out of it because we were playing awesome games!

So if someone does take anything from tabletop day, I hope its their love of games and that it’s ok to like the things you like, because if we can collectively be 3300 events in one day around the world, we really aren’t alone in thinking the way we do!

and all for just picking up a board games and playing it? thats why gaming is beautiful and important.